VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presents an Authors’ Talk - “Van Gogh: The Life,” Thursday, December 15, at 6:30pm, in the Caroline Wiess Law Building. This event is open to the public. Admission is free. A reception and book signing follow the lecture.

Vincent van Gogh has achieved a level of celebrity unique among cultural figures. Each year, more than two million people visit the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and almost half a million people visit Van Gogh’s grave in Auvers. Retrospective exhibitions of his work—which seem to occur nearly every year—draw hundreds of thousands of people to major museums around the world.

Join authors Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith as they talk about Van Gogh: The Life, their new biography that reshapes the landscape of the artist’s life and death. The book is especially notable for its detailing of Van Gogh’s turbulent early career, first as an art dealer in the family business, then as a preacher, and finally as one of the unhappiest but most incandescently productive figures in the history of art.

Because of the wealth of materials available to them, Naifeh and Smith have not only written an account of an extraordinary, and at times emotionally convulsive, life but also produced perhaps the first book to trace the workings of Van Gogh’s mind with such graphic, gripping, and inspirational detail.

Best-selling authors Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith won the Pulitzer Prize in 1991 for their biography "Jackson Pollock: An American Saga."

Pictured: Vincent van Gogh, detail The Rocks, 1888, oil on canvas. Gift of Audrey Jones Beck.